Page 75 - Demo

73Caroma bathroom stools soon found their way into cafes, restaurants and laundromats, and were even used as a handy poolside table.If one thing defines Australia it%u2019s our ability to adapt things for completely di%u00a0 erent uses, and the Caroma bathroom stool is a perfect example of exactly that. Designed by Charles Rothauser and Bruce Thompson for Caroma and released in 1967, this simple plastic stool, made of two pieces of moulded plastic joined together, with a plastic lid, was intended to be used as a bathroom stool. I%u2019m still not exactly sure what a bathroom stool is, to be honest. But Aussies soon worked out that you could do more with these little units than rest your wet towel or dirty undies on one. Caroma bathroom stools soon found their way into cafes, restaurants and laundromats, and%u00a0were even used as a handy poolside table. But their real moment to shine came in the late 1970s and early 1980s with the rise of tabletop video games.If you were sitting down to play Space Invaders, Frogger or Galaga at your local pinball arcade or fish and chip shop, and you weren%u2019t sitting on a milk crate, there%u2019s a pretty good chance you were sitting on a Caroma stool. In those heady days, nobody really cared that they came in twelve fashionable colours and had been successfully exported to the Caribbean. At%u00a0the time, a Caroma bathroom stool was just somewhere to rest your Faberg%u00e9 jeans%u2013clad bum while you pumped twenty-cent coins into a%u00a0machine.YEAR 1967DESIGNERS Charles Rothauser and Bruce ThompsonMANUFACTURER Caroma